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St. LOUIS—December 20, 2016—Benson Hill Biosystems, an agricultural technology company unlocking the genetic potential of plants, today announced Paul Skroch has joined the organization as Vice President of Data Science and Platform Engineering. An experienced leader, Skroch will support the company’s rapid growth and drive the further development of Benson Hill’s advanced analytics and digital platform strategies.

“Benson Hill leverages data science and technology platforms to enable innovation across a broader ecosystem of partners,” said Skroch. “I’m excited to work alongside a strong team of scientists, investors and businesspeople who are creating new value and opportunity in the science and business of agriculture.”

Skroch’s expertise in genetics, breeding, data science and enterprise platform design come at an opportune time for Benson Hill, which is moving into a new stage of growth. As director of R&D information technology analytics at Monsanto, Skroch developed and led the company’s first advanced analytics team, inventing solutions using machine learning, pipeline simulation, geospatial analytics and operations research. These discoveries have transformed Monsanto’s discovery, development and manufacturing pipelines and set the stage for the future of data science at Monsanto. Skroch held prior leadership positions developing systems for genotyping, molecular and predictive breeding, pipeline analysis and advancement. At Benson Hill, he will oversee the data science and systems biology groups as well as software development.

“This organizational change represents a milestone for our company,” said Matthew Crisp, CEO of Benson Hill. “In the last year, our company more than doubled in size to 50 team members as we broadened our partner offering from a focus on trait discovery to include direct access to the full capabilities of CropOS. Paul’s expertise positions us to deliver on the potential of our analytics solutions across a broad spectrum of use cases, including breeding and genome editing. We are excited to have Paul on board as we push the boundaries of innovation in crop genomics.”